Tim Burgess should be exhausted. He has compiled two Tim’s Twitter Listening Party books, hosted hundreds of virtual parties and completed three solo albums since his main hustle, the Charlatans, last released music in 2018. He also lost his dad and split with his girlfriend during the pandemic. Still, with Burgess’s ever-effervescent resolve to make the best of a bad beat, Typical Music has a pleasingly freewheeling friskiness.
By exchanging the Charlatans’ comfort zone of eerie yet dancey grandeur for something more slippery and scrappy (he has described these songs as sci-fi surf punk, yet also said that he planned to record them with an orchestra), this is an album that perfectly reflects Burgess’s guileless, up-for-anything, good-egg nature.
The title track is a gem: three sketches of ideas collapsed into each other, similar to pocket-psych epic Lost, while In May is more straightforwardly pretty. There’s a tendency to indulge weightless whimsy, which does occasionally pall across 22 tracks, but he just about gets away with it. “I hope you don’t find me too boring,” Burgess enquires solicitously on the open-hearted When I See You, and it’s a pleasure to hear his hopes fulfilled.
